Lab Resources

The three “food groups” of a home lab boils down to: servers, storage, and network. Here are some whitebox and retail hardware items that are suggested as components in your home lab. You can also hit up the VMware HCL to look for specific hardware that is supported by VMware.

My question is before ESXi i had this system config’d with Win 7 Pro as host running WKS9 with my VMs on it. I wanted ESXi expereince though and didn’t want to just run a vm in WKS9. So here is my question:

I also used the box as a media server. What would be the be practice to continue that method? Run a VM of a media server and just create a 3-4 TB VM? Or buy some type of external drives and interface via USB and create a VM and use that USB storage as shared storage?

With most of the whitebox lab builds I’ve seen most people go with the Intel i7 processor. Due to cost wouldn’t it provide more power to get the 8 core AMD over the 4 core i7?
What are the pro’s and con’s of looking at it this way?

I’ve been reviewing your website for awhile and have commented in the past. Appreciate all the work you’ve shared!

It depends on what your lab is doing, but for me the E3 processor is already overkill (plus it’s a low wattage CPU). RAM is the chief resource consumed in the lab, and a low watt / low heat CPU results in less wasted money and energy on cooling. I also have very little experience with AMD, with my last one being the K7 many years back 🙂

I’m in need of a second host and currently repurposed an older AMD 6 core, but I can’t even use EVC. I’d rather have a low power build with an Intel i7, but then I’d have to buy two builds and then sell my old one.

Hey Chris, your website and lab work has really been a great inspiration and a great help!! Here’s my hardware to share out. Nothing spectacular or extreme: i7-4770 with 32GB RAM and a standard micro-ATX board, but what’s interesting is that I see a lot of people going with fancier builds (i.e. Xeon-E3, Supermicro boards). I’m wondering if there’s any gains I missed out on by going with an i7 build instead (or any hardware in general). I still see people going for them but see more Xeon boxes in labs. I guess it’s something to consider when I expand.

Everything is in a Dell half rack. LCD, KB, mouse, and a 4 port usb kvm are on top of it when needed. The NAS, console host, and all network gear are on a APC BX1500G ups.

I have the nas providing iscsi luns to the esx hosts right now. I’ve been pondering upgrading the nas from the atom to one of the new Intel D-1540’s that were just released. I’d probably load esxi on it, run the nas, console/internal web server, and the external web server all on it as guests and get rid of all the atom systems.. they are a bit old. Also FreeNAS lost it’s bite when they split the project between FreeNAS and Nas4Free years ago. All versions after 7.x have had serious performance hits on my existing hardware.. If my drives were stable on 7.x I’d still run it but new drives didnt play nice in the older releases. I’d be curious what peoples thoughts are on homebrew nas distros. While I like the convenience of the web interfaces I’m at the point where I may roll my own with FreeBSD 10.1 and use nfs.

Hi Chris. I built my first host based on your ESX1 system. It’s time for me to add a host. I expect to base my build on your ESX3 system. Are there any updates you’d recommend that I consider since you posted that build? Also, any thoughts on how you would proceed if you wanted a rack mount variant of your system — perhaps 2U to avoid noise often associated with 1U systems? As always, thanks for everything you do!

I haven’t yet started specing out a new build. The Haswell build is, so far, working just fine, so I don’t have any complaints. But it’s very likely that there are better parts to use. I have plans to age out my Dell T110 sometime in 2016, which is when I’ll comb through parts for another round of ESXi host construction. Until then, Paul over at https://tinkertry.com/ has some really spectacular home lab stuff on a regular basis.